It Made Him Great

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Ryan Holiday?

  It made him great. Abraham Lincoln was shaped by one book more than any other. You might guess that would be the Bible, given the ease with which he would quote and allude to ideas from it in his speeches and letters over the years. But Lincoln's faith was actually something that evolved more slowly over time, especially after the tragedies that rocked him later in life. Instead, when he was young, he fell in love with Aesop's fables. "This was a book he read over and over again," one friend observed. "These fables, written by a slave and a storyteller who lived in ancient Greece around 620 B.C., they spoke to Lincoln's soul." He memorized large chunks of the book. His mind, which had always tended towards anecdotes and story, just locked on to Aesop's brilliant method for teaching complicated moral lessons

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  and clever fictions about mice and lions and foxes. It became a lens through which he came to understand human nature, the language with which he tried to communicate reality through. You know his famous line about how a house divided against itself cannot stand? "That was Jesus," he was quoting, but he did it next to a recounting of Aesop's fable about a bundle of sticks. And actually, Aesop has a second fable illustrating the same point, but told about a lion and three bulls. Where would Lincoln have been had he not been introduced to this wisdom early? Where might the country have ended up without that wisdom making its way into his brain as a child? And the same could be said for the thousands of generations of men and women who were introduced to Aesop and his lessons. Whether they were learning about sour grapes

• 2:00Ryan Holiday?

  or golden eggs or that slow and steady win the race. And the fact that you almost certainly recognize at least a couple of these phrases or ideas without hearing the full stories demonstrate how indelibly they have made their way through culture. However old your kids or grandkids are, you should take some time to read them these stories, talk with them about them, illustrate these lessons and ideas, the things you want your kids to know through them. They are timeless for a reason. It's because they're true and it's because they work. I actually carry a great edition of Aesop's Fables at the Painted Porch, which you can grab. I'll link to that in today's show notes. And then I wrote two fables, one about Marcus Aurelius and one about Epictetus, where I try to teach some of these lessons through that power of story. If you want to teach your kids Stoicism,

• 2:44Ryan Holiday?

  that could be a way in. That's one of the questions I get most often. And it's how I introduced my own kids to them. And we talk about these ideas through these fictitious, but based in reality, fables. And they help me with them. So I'm really proud of those two books. You can grab The Boy Who Would Be King and The Girl Who Would Be Free at the Painted Porch or go to store.dailydad.com.